FlipKart never wanted to Flop it .

Thinking of E retailing giants, the first name which comes to a major section of the online shoppers is Flipkart , while they have done a great work in positioning themselves at the top , that has also exposed them to the constant radar of delivering more than what they promise.

6-10-2014 , little would the Bansals have thought that the following day will need them to personally send apologies to the loyal customers but let's come to that a little later .

The mega sale meant 50 tonnes of copper, 700,000 man hours, 800 km of cabling and 30 km of optic fibers airlifted from abroad.Even as Flipkart’s Big Billion Day sale in October clocked a gross merchandise value (GMV) of $100 million, the event was marred by glitches, and promoters Sachin and Binny Bansal had to apologize. But if details of scale behind the scenes are anything to go by, the company had made extensive preparations for the event. The event was planned over more than 700,000 man hours (six months of work put in by 280 people over 14 hours every day) to get the back-end systems ready.

Flipkart spent an estimated $5-15 million in various media for marketing the sale and was more successful than they could expect . I feel that the two key issues here are credibility (leading to customer faith) as well as over promising. Customers who saw the big ads thought that they would get a big deal, but the steal deals  were never there. I personally checked the site at 7:58 AM on the website and saw that the Rs. 60 hard disk was already out of stock when the sale was supposed to start at 8:00 AM. To me, my faith in the company has been dented, and it will take a lot more than an apology letter or their App Offers to make me a loyalist. At the very least, along with the letter, they should have offered a discount coupon on all their products to its customers who had participated in the sale a couple of days after the sale ended. In fact, before the sale, I had high regard for the Flipkart team.

 The second issue is that the company did not have the infrastructure (The additional capacity created for the mega sale was higher than Flipkart had done  through the seven years since its launch in 2007, an executive from the company’s IT team said.) to handle so many requests for the same product. Products on offer were less and buyers were more. So technically it is not a billion customers who were happy, but a few hundred. They over promised

. Should have been called the Few Hundred Sale I guess!  the underlying problem here was - they over promised and Underestimated . Foreseeing was a problem .

They could have also told the customers that it would take time for delivery rather than getting the orders and later saying it'd take a time after the order is dispatched.. It irks the customers ... One area which bemused me was , why did they have to show it out of stock , even if it had to be ? they could have easily taken the orders and told the customers it'd take time to be delivered , the customers would have been more than happy and i'm sure they would have understood the intensity if the sales and accepted the delay in the delivery . 

 To succeed in the future, they must make an ever better offer, this time, with better management of traffic and more products on offer. But it is unlikely that it will happen soon as it is a high risk proposition. If it fails again, it may be over for the company. My guess is that Flipkart will lie low for some time and maybe in 6 months to 1 year attempt something really big but that would also mean giving their competitors some heavy time to cash in to the dented minds of the customers who are unsatisfied and ever hungry for cheap deals...

The key learning that one could take is - always Under promise and over deliver , and how foreseeing is important ...